Studying the Schoolmasters’ Salaries

Toward the end of their 8 May 1770 town meeting, Bostonians turned to approving salaries for the town’s schoolteachers.

There were five town schools—two grammar or Latin schools and three writing schools. However, not all the teachers were compensated equally. Here are the salaries for the masters at each school:

• John Lovell, South Latin School (shown here): £120.
• Samuel Hunt, North Latin School: £100.
• John Proctor, Queen Street Writing School: £100.
• Samuel Holbrook, South Writing School: £100.
• John Tileston, North Writing School: £100.

Obviously, the town valued John Lovell’s services significantly more than any other master. There were a number of factors, including his long tenure at the South Latin School and how that school was twice as large as the North Latin School. But the town always spent more on the grammar schools.

The disparity was even more pronounced when we add in the salaries that the meeting approved for each assistant master or usher:

• James Lovell, usher, South Latin School: £60, plus £40 “as an encouragement for him to remain and exert himself in the Service of the Town the ensuing Year.”
• James Carter, usher, Queen Street Writing School: £50, plus £25 for encouragement.
• Assistant for the South Writing School, to be named later: £50.
• Assistant for the North Writing School, to be paid through Tileston: £34.

Tileston’s assistant was William Dall, who turned seventeen years old in 1770. He was still an apprentice and thus worth only two-thirds of a regular usher’s salary.

At the South Writing School, Samuel Holbrook had become master partway through the school year after the death of his uncle Abiah, but he’d taught at the Queen Street School years before. His assistant might have been John Fenno, born in in 1751 and thus also still under age.

James Carter was an experienced teacher who would take over the Queen Street Writing School in a couple of years, which is probably why the town offered him “encouragement” to stay on the job.

But Boston really encouraged James Lovell at the South Latin School, paying him as an usher as much money as every master but his father. He was a Harvard graduate working under his father, and people might have felt he was turning away better prospects. Indeed, later that year, the congregation at Christ Church invited Lovell to preach during a dispute with their pastor, the Rev. Mather Byles, Jr.

That disparity in spending on the different schools becomes even more stark when we look at the number of children each of those schoolteachers served. Here’s how many scholars a town committee found at each school a couple of months later in 1770:

• South Latin School, 137 boys.
• North Latin School, 56 boys.
• South Writing School, 231 boys.
• Queen Street Writing School, 268 boys.
• North Writing School, 250 boys.

Even without an usher at the North Latin School, the town was paying £320 to give 193 boys a grammar-school education (or, really, part of one since about two-thirds of each entering class dropped out without finishing). That’s per-pupil spending of £1.66.

Meanwhile, the town was spending £459 to educate the other 749 boys in the practical skills of handwriting and arithmetic. That was £0.61 per pupil.

Clearly the system favored the students at the Latin Schools, most of them coming from the town’s richer families. Though Boston prided itself on its public schools, the system wasn’t equitable. (And about half of the boys in town of school age weren’t in the public schools at all. Not to mention no girls or black children.)

There was one more piece of business for Boston’s 8 May 1770 town meeting: to vote £100 to David Jeffries “for his Services as Treasurer of the Town the Year past, and for all his Expences in that Office.” Someone had to pay the schoolmasters.

A Schoolmaster During the Siege

I’ve shared reminiscences from Benjamin Russell and Harrison Gray Otis of how their Boston public schools closed in April 1775 with the outbreak of war (and how their stories got intertwined). That was the end of town-sponsored education in Boston until after the British military left the next March. Families probably kept up lessons for little kids, teaching them to read—which had always been a private responsibility. But I didn’t think anyone was teaching the handwriting, business math, or Latin and Greek of the public schools.

Then I found a mention of Elias Dupee in Zechariah Whitman’s 1842 history of the Ancient & Honorable Artillery Company. That eventually led me to this sentence in Caleb Snow’s 1828 History of Boston:

During the siege, the town schools were suspended: a few children attended the instructions of Mr. Elias Dupee, who remained in Boston, and gratuitously devoted himself to his employment of a teacher, in which he took peculiar delight.

A number of other books repeat that statement, sometimes in different words but without additional details. Oliver A. Roberts’s later history of the Ancients & Honorables says that Dupee was a Freemason and held several town offices, including tax collector and constable. From 1764 to 1769 he regularly advertised in Boston newspapers that he was selling goods in a “New Auction-Room,” which moved around a bit; in February 1769 he was “over Mr. John Dupee, Mathematical Instrument Maker’s Shop.”

Poking around for more information about Dupee’s pedagogical career, I found that on 9 Apr 1776 private-school teacher John Leach wrote from Boston to one of the public-school masters, John Tileston, then staying at Windham, Connecticut:

The Selectmen have been so busy that I have not had opportunity to see them in a Body. The people are flocking into Town very fast, and there are great Numbers already Come in. I see Mr. Webb, and Mr. Holmes, and Mr. Parker, and several of our Friends, and they are all of opinion that you had better return to your school as soon as you can. . . . Martin [Master? Samuel] Hunt is in Town, and Dupee still continues at your Schoole

So during the siege Dupee used the North Writing School, owned by the town. The selectmen voted to reopen the public schools on 5 June. Tileston was back by then, and the records don’t mention Dupee.

At some point Dupee set up his own school in the Sandemanian meeting-house off Middle Street (now Hanover) in the North End. The Sandemanians were a Christian sect out of Scotland that had won over some locals in the decade before the Revolution. Many left with the British troops. On 5 Oct 1785, selectmen Moses Grant and John Andrews became “a Committee to treat with Mr. [Isaac] Winslow respecting a Schoolhouse lately improved by Mr. [Elias] Dupe known by the Name of Sandemons Meeting house.”

Within a month, the selectmen and Winslow on behalf of the Sandemanians agreed to a rent of £20 per year, minus what “three indifferent Persons” judged to be the fair cost of the town’s repairs “to the Wood House & Necessarys.” That suggests Dupee may not have been teaching in that building very recently; he was the latest user, but perhaps not a recent one.

That building became known as the Middle Street Writing School and was assigned to Master Samuel Cheney. Tileston was still at the North Writing School, so it looks like the North End’s youth population was growing enough to require two schools in that part of town. In 1789 Boston undertook a big education reform, and the next year the town gave up the lease and built new schools for itself. Elias Dupee never became one of Boston’s public schoolmasters.

The 27 Dec 1800 Constitutional Telegraphe of Boston reported at the top of its list of deaths: “Suddenly, on Wednesday last at Dedham Mr. Elias Dupee, formerly a Schoolmaster in this town, Aged 74.” Dedham town records say he died “of old Age” at the house of Daniel Baldwin, where he was boarding, and was aged 76. Some sources say Dupee had been born in 1716, and was thus 84.

TOMORROW: The Constitutional Telegraphe?!

[The thumbnail above shows the historical marker for the site of teacher John Tileston’s house in the North End, courtesy of Leo Reynolds’s Flickr stream under a Creative Commons license.]

“Who Have No Benefit of the Publick Schools”

On 30 June 1789, in the midst of the debate over Boston’s public-school system that I discussed yesterday, the Herald of Freedom newspaper printed this letter, signed “C.”:

Messrs. Printers,

A writer in your paper of the 12th inst. [i.e., of this month] appears to be very angry that an attempt hath been made to discontinue the North Grammar School; and asks “who the men are the advocate the measure?” I answer they are men of property—men who pay large taxes in the town; and who have no benefit of the publick schools.

I will now ask in my turn, why gentlemen should be so highly taxed to pay for the education of some people’s children; when if their fathers and mothers dressed less extravagantly, they would be able to pay for their children’s learning at private schools?

We, in this town, may look for great advantages from our new Congressional Government: but until frugality and industry are more practised among all ranks, the complaint of bad times will continue.

The children of the poor ought to be early inured to labor—in England and Holland, many people’s children earn their living at seven years of age, by being employed in some manufactory; but in this town little master is rigged up and sent to a grammar school, to learn latin for two or three years, or more—then to learn to write a fine hand, that he may at fourteen, be qualified for a merchant’s store, or a shop. Miss is sent to a dancing school, to be taught a polite behaviour, to the neglect of the necessary accomplishments for a good wife.

These things are peculiar to the seaport towns, in this state; and one great cause of such general complaint of distressing times, in my opinion, is the great number of publick schools. It is the judgment of many, that if an experiment was made, by dropping all except one grammar and one writing school, just to answer the law—that in this town we should soon experience the salutary effects of such a measure; and it is to be hoped that the Gentlemen who now have the management of this matter, will make a trial, for one year only; and if it should not soon answer, they can easily put them upon the footing they now are.

As I described yesterday, Bostonians did not adopt this proposal. The town voted to close the North Latin School, but it also chose to expand the schools for teaching reading and writing in English, and open them up to more children.

(The photo above by Leo Reynolds shows a plaque in the North End commemorating John Tileston, among other locals, Tileston taught in the Boston public schools from 1752 to 1819, spanning the education reform of 1789. The image comes from Flickr via a Creative Commons license.)

William Dall: apprentice schoolteacher, merchant

“Back to School” Week(s) at Boston 1775 comes to a close with this profile of a young schoolteacher caught up in the start of the Revolution.

William Dall was the son of William and Elizabeth (Bradford) Dall, born in Boston on 22 Dec 1753. He prepared for a career in business by attending the town’s Writing School on Queen Street, and apparently became a star student. In 1767, at the age of thirteen, he drew a writing sample, a design of ovals around the words “Viva la Plume,” that’s now part of the Abiah Holbrook collection at Harvard’s Houghton Library.

The following year, William went to work as the assistant to Master John Tileston at the North Writing School in Boston’s North End. He was probably no more than a few months older than the top class in the school. I suspect a large part of his job was cutting pens for the younger boys. The town allocated £34 to Tileston for William’s work, or two-thirds of what it usually paid a full-grown assistant teacher, or “usher.”

In December 1774, Dall turned twenty-one, no longer a minor. He was already seeking to earn some extra money for himself with this advertisement in the 26 Sept Boston Gazette:

Writing and Arithmetic
To be taught in Evenings.
The School to be open’d 1st Monday in October next,
at the Writing School House in Queen-Street,
and to be continued for the Season.
Where due Care will be taken for Instruction in its various Branches as usual, and it is hoped will meet with a like Acceptance, which shall be the Aim of the Subscriber, as Assistant in one of the public Schools.
WILLIAM DALL, Jun.

Six and a half months later, the war began, and Boston’s schools closed. The majority of the schoolteachers sided with the Patriots and left town, seeking some way to support themselves.

Dall went to New Haven, Connecticut, and in the 14 June 1775 Connecticut Gazette announced:

Writing & Arithmetick

William Dall, Respectfully informs the Public, That he has opened school, in the small building adjoining Deacon Abraham Abgur’s house; where youth will be taught the above branches in the most concise and methodical manner:—

He flatters himself, that he shall be able to give satisfaction, as he had been employ’d by the town of Boston, in one of the public schools, for several years past, and hopes he shall merit approbation, as he is determin’d to exert every faculty for the improvement of those put under his care.

N B. Reading and spelling likewise taught at said school.

After the British military left Boston, Dall returned and worked in the public schools until 1777. However, with a much smaller population than before the war, the town didn’t need so many teachers.

Dall became a merchant instead. In 1779 he was the first employer of Thomas Handysyd Perkins, who later became wildly successful in the China trade and opium business. In April 1790, Dall advertised “a general assortment of Spring Goods,” mostly cloth, just imported on the ship Neptune. The 1796 Boston directory listed him as owning a shop on Orange Street and a house on Washington Street.

In 1781 Dall married Mary Parker in the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper’s church; they had two children together, but she died in 1783. In 1791 he married Rebecca Keen in Pembroke, her home town; they had five children.

Dall served as a militia captain in Boston. In 1787 he became a member of the Ancient & Honorable Artillery Company, but he never held any office in that private group.

William Dall died on 18 Sept 1829. Some of his correspondence with his sons William and James after 1810 is in the University of Massachusetts library. The Bernard & S. Dean Levy galleries have recently offered portraits of Dall (thumbnail above; note that he’s holding a pen) and his second wife.

Boston's Schools in 1770 by the Numbers

I’ve decided it’s “Back to School Week” at Boston 1775. Every posting (well, ’most every posting) for the next few days will be about schooling in Boston during the Revolutionary era.

In the summer of 1770, the annual committee to inspect Boston’s five public schools counted how many boys were studying at each.

• South Latin School: 119
• North Latin School: 56
• South Writing School: 231
• Queen Street Writing School: 268
• North Writing School: 250

By my estimate, in 1765 a little over half of all white boys of school age in Boston were attending one of the town schools. The rest were presumably working, and perhaps taking private part-time lessons as well.

How many teachers were there? Typically, a school had one master and one “usher,” or assistant teacher. In practice, there were variations on this set-up.

• South Latin School: Master John Lovell and his usher (and son), James Lovell
• North Latin School: Master Samuel Hunt
• South Writing School: Master Samuel Holbrook and his usher, whose name is not recorded
  
• Queen Street Writing School: Master John Proctor and his usher, James Carter
• North Writing School: Master John Tileston and his assistant, sixteen-year-old William Dall

You can do the math on student-teacher ratios. It’s not a pretty picture.

Finally, here’s the total of what the town voted to pay the schoolteachers at the town meeting in March of that year.

• South Latin School: £220 (£120 to Master Lovell and £60 to James Lovell, plus a £40 grant to the younger man “as an encouragement for him to remain and exert himself in the Service of the Town”)
• North Latin School: £100 (Master Hunt had asked for a salary equal to Master Lovell’s, but was denied. Even so, proportional to his student body he was the best paid teacher in town.)
• South Writing School: £150 (£100 to Master Holbrook and £50 to the unnamed usher)
  
• Queen Street Writing School: £175 (£100 to Master Proctor and £50 to Carter, plus a £25 grant)
  
• North Writing School: £134 (£100 to Master Tileston and £34 for young William)
  

The town spent far more on each Latin School student than on each Writing School student.

What Wigs Said About Professions

In the 1700s, a gentleman’s white wig not only told other gentlemen that he was a gentleman, it could also signify what kind of gentleman he was. There were general styles worn by businessmen and planters, but there were also particular styles linked to professions.

Doctors, for example, wore a “physick’s wig,” which Karin Calvert says “had a woolly, teased appearance known as a natty bob.” In 1775 the British magazine Connoisseur said, “a physician would seem ridiculous prescribing in a bag-wig,” a type with a queue or ponytail at the rear in a cloth bag worn by laymen. Examples can be seen in portraits of Dr. John Lanzalotti and Dr. John Ash, and this satirical print from 1784. John S. Copley’s portrait of Dr. Silvester Gardiner seems to show a neater variation, perhaps reflecting his retirement from active medicine.

Another specialized subset was the “parson’s wig,” suitable for ministers and characterized by its “rows of neat curls.” An early-1700s version appears in this portrait of the Rev. Dr. Cotton Mather by Peter Pelham, the best engraver to work in Boston in that century (and, for a short time, J. S. Copley’s stepfather). Boston's ministers in the pre-Revolutionary period wore variations on this style: Rev. Dr. Jonathan Mayhew; Rev. Dr. Charles Chauncy; Rev. Dr. Mather Byles, Sr.; and Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles.

During the Revolution, a French visitor to Boston said of the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper:

He writes sprightly verses, and carries certainly much cleverness under the immense wig of a clergyman, which he wears bigger and more heavily powdered than any of his brethren.

The same style was used by men in another learned profession, the schoolmaster. A former student at Master John Tileston’s Writing School recalled that he “wore his wig, however, to the last, and never appeared at school without it. The pattern was the same that clergymen wore, and the engravings of Dr. [George] Whitefield and Dr. Samuel Cooper, will give an exact idea of it.”

The legal profession is the only one in which people still wear eighteenth-century-style white wigs, at least in many parts of the British Commonwealth. Different shapes distinguished judges, barristers, and solicitors. (In Massachusetts, the lawyers grouped by the Boston bar as “barristers” and “solicitors” did the same legal tasks; the first group were simply more senior.) Copley painted Samuel Quincy, the province’s Solicitor General and thus a leading attorney, in a barrister’s wig. The less skilled (and therefore less expensive) artist Benjamin Blyth produced the first portrait of John Adams in similar headgear.

Of course, a gentleman could choose whatever style within particular groupings he thought would best fit his face, fashion sense, and budget. And some men, such as Boston's Dr. Joseph Warren and George Washington, wore their own hair with a dusting of white powder.

(There were also specific types of wigs for footmen, coachmen, and other servants, but those demonstrated the genteel taste and wealth of the wearers’ employers, not the wearers themselves.)

I have to admit my eye for the differences among groups of wigs isn’t well developed. It feels like when I was a boy and my best friends could identify different makes of car from blocks away, but I hadn’t learned the distinctions. ("That's a, um, blue car?") In the eighteenth century men could probably spot and grasp the difference between a wig with two side-curls versus one with three the same way my mom knew the difference between a three-hole Buick and a four-hole Buick.

John Tileston: disabled writing teacher

John Tileston (1735-1826) taught at Boston’s public writing school in the North End for sixty-five years, starting as an “usher” or assistant schoolmaster in 1754 and retiring as an octogenarian in 1819.

Before and during the Revolution, the town’s three writing schools educated more boys than the two more famous and prestigious Latin Schools. For the most part, the writing-school curriculum was, literally, handwriting: learning how to use a quill pen to create dignified-looking documents in two or three genteel styles. This was an important skill in business, but it also shows how limited public schooling then was.

According to his 1887 biographer, D. C. Colesworthy, Tileston (pronounced “TILL-iss-tun”) came to teach writing because a childhood injury limited the jobs he could do:

When John was an infant, he was severely burnt by falling into the fire, and the consequence was so serious an injury to one of his hands that the complete use of his fingers he never recovered. He was thus incapacitated for mechanical or other employments that required the full use of his hands. Notwithstanding this affliction the defective hand became perfectly adapted to the holding of a pen and for writing. After leaving school, at the age of fourteen, young Tileston was placed under the care of...[the master of a writing school] in Boston, where he served faithfully an apprenticeship of six or seven years.

Colesworthy named Tileston’s master as Zachariah Hicks. Education reformer William B. Fowle, who knew Tileston personally, stated that his trainer and model was Master John Proctor of the Queen Street Writing School in central Boston. In 1761, Tileston became a schoolmaster in his own right in the North End.

[ADDENDUM in 2019: John Proctor, Sr., was master of the North Writing School from 1731 to 1743. Hicks was Proctor’s usher starting in 1733 and succeeded him in from 1743 to 1761. John Proctor, Jr., was Hicks’s first usher before becoming master of the Queen Street Writing School. Tileston was Hicks’s second usher, starting in 1754 when he was nineteen. Thus, it’s conceivable that Tileston started writing school under the elder Proctor, but he definitely had most of his schooling under Hicks and the younger Proctor together. According to Colesworthy, he served an adolescent apprenticeship with Hicks. According to Fowle, he modeled his teaching after the younger Proctor.]

Edward Everett, the less-remembered orator at Gettysburg, remembered that Tileston’s hand, though disabled, was strong and hard enough to give scholars blows to the head that “would have done credit to the bill of an albatross.” Corporal punishment was still considered an educational tool in the late 1700s. Everett also recalled how Tileston seized toys he found students playing with:

His long, deep desk was a perfect curiosity shop of confiscated balls, tops, penknives, marbles, and jews-harps, the accumulation of forty years.

Yet Fowle judged that “Master Tileston was not severe in his discipline, as was his great oracle, Master Proctor.” Tileston was also known for wearing a powdered wig and Revolutionary-era clothing long after they had gone out of fashion.

Esther Forbes wrote about Tileston and his burned hand in her Pulitzer Prize–winning biography, Paul Revere and the World He Lived In (1942). I suspect the schoolmaster was therefore the inspiration for the injury Johnny Tremain suffers in the novel Forbes published the following year. Tileston is also memorialized in the name of a short street in Boston’s North End where his school once stood.